Investing in Green
by Francine Hardaway
Published on January 30th, 2008
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Alliance Global Investors has just conducted a new survey of global environmental investing trends. The people who answered the survey have over $100,000 invested in the stock market, mostly in mutual funds.
I looked at the survey to see what might interest us here at Earth911, and here are some interesting facts:
1)71% of the investors surveyed say environmental technology companies are a good investment right now. But taking a look further into the survey reveals that they don’t even know what kinds of environmental technologies are out there.
2)Only 22% of investors know about the EnergyStar label on appliances
3)Only 29% of investors know anything about carbon offsets.
4) 40% of investors don’t know anything at all about CAFE standards for fuel economy.
Investors don’t even really know what “green investing” is. 60% of them think it means investing in companies that are trying to be good corporate citiziens, while only 40% think it means investing in new technologies. And only 17% have ever bought a mutual fund because it was connected to either solutions for climate change or scarcity of resources.
It turns out that most people don’t know how to invest in environmental trends, and don’t think there are enough environmental investments to put money into.
What does all this mean?
It means that we have to concentrate on reduce, re-use, and recycle, otherwise known as product stewardship, while we wait for the investor to be comfortable investing in new technology. Although Americans would love to have a technological fix for our environmental problems, and most of them think we will eventually bail ourselves out of our climate change problems through technology, they’re not so willing to put their money where their mouths are.
Educating the public, and investors in particular, about the specifics of our environmental issues is going to take a long time, and we’ve only scratched the surface with the current wave of “green” business and green marketing. In the mean time, you and your business can help by doing your best to conserve scarce resources and lower your carbon footprint through recycling
